Tuesday, November 08, 2005

James McGovern thinks open source provides the enterprise with numerous advantages not afforded with traditional commercial software where users can feel more like a customer and not a like a prisoner.The value proposition of gaining access to source code before using the software will allow the enterprise to avoid the fury of acquisitions of software and the enterprises not only can gain loose coupling by adhering to industry standards and approaches such as service-oriented architectures but loose coupling is also gained by not being shackled to every strategic decision made by your vendor. James finds Liferay Enterprise Portal very easy to install and out of the box came with 3x the number of portlets than most commercial portal offerings, capable of connecting to many databases and application servers. Zero vendor lock-in he says was quite liberating. Liferay has proven itself as being highly scalable, customizable and most importantly secure and worthy of consideration not just for large enterprises but small shops as well.They have avoided vendor lock-in and the tactics used by other open source software vendors by making documentation freely accessible without requiring registration, payment or other constraints. High quality timely support is freely available via email listserv's and it has a business friendly licensing model that allows enterprises and software vendors to modify and distribute with zero license fees. He thinks moving forward that the most agile of enterprises strive to turn significant chunks of their IT infrastructure into commodities. This is the only way that they will ultimately reduce total cost of ownership. This is best accomplished by slowly adopting open source alternatives and ultimately contributing to it. My own views about opensource are fairly well known -I shall however try and add my perspective on Liferay deployment in the next 6-8 weeks when a liferay implemetayion that some of my colleagues are involved in makes enough progress.